درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Culture is an integral facet of teaching and learning English as a foreign language. This qualitative study examined EFL teachers’ perceptions toward fostering their students’ cultural awareness in Iranian language schools. Based on a researcher-developed protocol, semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve EFL teachers from Tehran, Karaj, and Urmia, Iran, whose teaching experiences ranged from 6 to 19 years, with the purpose of identifying their perceptions, experiences, and challenges regarding fostering students’ cultural awareness. The interviews drew upon emergent methodology to categorize the interviewees’ value-laden comments into six major attitudinal themes of meaning of culture, the role of English culture and social norms in EFL teaching and learning, the materials and activities teachers employ to foster their students’ cultural awareness, benefits of teaching English culture in Iranian language schools, EFL teachers’ challenges regarding teaching English culture, and teachers’ suggestions or recommendations regarding teaching culture in the Iranian EFL context. The findings illustrated that despite the fact that Iranian EFL teachers preferred to include cultural content in their courses, they faced a variety of challenges regarding teaching English culture and social norms. Further, Iranian policymakers, stakeholders, and educators are expected to provide professional training opportunities for EFL teachers in teaching English culture. Thus, teaching culture should be underscored in EFL classes and instructors are required to explore and apply various effective strategies and authentic materials to enhance their language learners’ cultural knowledge. The implications are presented and discussed in more detail in the paper.

This study aimed at identifying the most frequent test-taking strategies used by successful Iranian male and female university entrance exam EFL applicants. To this end, 150 English major male and female freshman students who got admission to three reputable state universities of Isfahan, Shiraz, and Tehran were selected conveniently and purposively. The model used in this study was developed by Barati (2005) consisting of planning, monitoring, evaluation, and test-wiseness strategies. After selecting the participants, the modified questionnaire developed based on Barati’s test-taking strategy taxonomy was distributed among the participants. Based on the analysis of results, it was revealed that the EFL learners made frequent use of planning, monitoring, evaluation, and test-wiseness strategies, but only the level of use of planning and monitoring strategies reached statistical significance. Moreover, male and female EFL learners were only significantly different in their use of evaluation strategies, but in terms of using planning, monitoring, and test-wiseness strategies, males and females were not significantly different from one another. The findings of the study bear useful implications for EFL learners, teachers, materials designers, and test constructors.

The present study sought to cast light on differences in strategies of compliment responses used across Persian and American English. For this purpose, 110 participants, under three groups of Persian native speakers, American native speakers, and Persian learners of English, answered a Discourse Completion Test (DCT), followed by a semi-structured interview with the Persian learners of English to cross-check the findings of the DCTs. The collected responses from the DCTs were coded at macro and micro-levels. Moreover, a macro-level of Persian cultural schemas was used for the Persian groups. The chi-square test revealed the independent performance of the three groups. Judged by the written DCTs while performing in English, the learners’ responses displayed cases of utilizing the native Persian cultural schemas. More specifically, the English learner respondents employed different instances of ta’arof and shekaste-nafsi . Confirmed by the interview, such failures resulted from insufficient exposure to the American English culture and more importantly from their lack of instruction and awareness of cross-cultural pragmatic differences.

Teacher professional development rests on the provision of knowledge, development of skills, and change of attitudes of teacher candidates and in-service teachers. Teachers’ professional knowledge, perceptions and teaching practice contribute greatly to student learning. This study sets out to investigate the relationships and inter-relationships among professional knowledge, academic self-concept and self-reported instructional practice which was found as a research gap in the literature. Using a sample of 92 pre-service TEFL teachers in Iran, a significant positive correlation was found between professional knowledge and academic self-concept. The findings also revealed that different domains of professional knowledge are not related to each other for TEFL. Finally, the obtained results indicated that academic self-concept affected instructional practice in total and at the level of sub-dimensions while professional knowledge had an effect on the two dimensions of instructional practice, namely cognitive activation and student learning support but not on the dimension of classroom management .

Classroom discourse refers to the language and interaction used by the teacher and the students to communicate and shape learning in the educational context. The present study focused on Iranian EFL teachers’ classroom discourse by observing their dominancy, teacher talk, question types, and interactions in their classes. To do so, through a non-experimental, descriptive research design, 20 female experienced teachers with the age range of 30-40, teaching at an upper-intermediate level in different language institutes in Isfahan, Iran were selected based on the convenience sampling. Two classes of the teachers were observed, the sessions were recorded, and their classroom discourses were transcribed and later analyzed. Moreover, to increase the validity and reliability of the research, a semi-structured interview was conducted with volunteer participants; their reflections on their communication with the learners and discourse types were collected and analyzed using descriptive statistics in terms of frequency and percentages. The findings of the study showed that the teachers made use of specific discourse to ascertain their dominance and control in their classes. The findings also revealed that the teachers used more monologic discourse patterns in their classes rather than dialogic ones. Teacher talk far exceeded student talk, Initiation-Response-Feedback pattern dominated the classroom discourse; and display questions were used more frequently than referential ones. These findings could benefit teachers to be more conscious about type of CD and its effect on student-to-student and teacher-to-student interactions. It could also serve the purpose of critical classroom discourse analysis

Annually, a good number of Iranian students who have completed their undergraduate studies in non-English-related majors apply and enroll in Master’s level Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) programs. Although evaluating MA TEFL program in Iran from university instructors’ and students’ perspectives has so far been the subject of several studies, the experiences and views of these TEFL major-changers have not been duly explored. To address the existing gap, in this qualitative research, the experiences of major-changers studying TEFL at MA level in three state universities in Tehran have been investigated. Besides, six TEFL university instructors were asked to share their perspectives concerning major-changers attending MA TEFL programs. In the main , the findings revealed that motives like interest in pursuing an English teaching career rather than a job related to their former major; gaining the required competency through attending crash courses held by university exam preparatory institutes; facing challenges in acquiring the specialized discourse of the community; and witnessing realities which ran counter to their prior supposition, as discussed by the major-changers and the instructors, formed part of the lived experiences and views of these major-changers.

Teacher immunity as a novel construct, acts as a defense against the demands placed on teachers and the distressing experiences faced which result in emotional burnout. The main aim of this study was to draw attention to this overlooked dimension of teacher motivation and professional identity through exploring the immunity levels of the student-teachers at teacher education universities in Iran. Accordingly, a mixed method study was designed to which 175 Iranian student-teachers (98 males and 77 females) majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) were randomly invited to this study. Language Teachers Immunity Questionnaire (LTIQ) was used to collect quantitative data on teachers' immunity levels and a semi-structured interview was conducted to collect the qualitative data. After conducting coding and content analyses using MAXQDA and running one-way ANOVA and independent samples t-test, both qualitative and quantitative data were analyzed. The results led to the identification of three immunity types, namely, negative (maladaptive), neutral and positive (productive) types. The results indicated that positive or productive immunity type was dominant among the student teachers. In addition the results of the study indicated that unlike gender, the years of education was a significant factor in terms of determining the immunity levels of the student teachers. Furthermore, the results of the study indicated that teacher immunity is a transient, dynamic and organic construct which fluctuates according to the reinforcement or deficiency of its comprising components such as efficacy and attitude, among others.

The main objective of the present study was to semantically and syntactically explore translation strategies applied by translators in the translation of chapter nineteen of Vandidad from Avestan to Middle Persian for ritual purposes. To this end, the Middle Persian translation of Vandidad was studied, and the meaning of the words accompanying their syntactic roles in the Avestan language were compared to their Middle Persian equivalents. Then, the strategies applied by the translators were divided into two categories: semantic and syntactic ones. The findings of the study can shed some light on the translation strategies applied in the translation of ancient texts which can be used for deeper and broader scientific inquiry into Iranian ancient languages.